What Follows A Weimar Moment?

By Cernig

I guess I'm not the only one who has noticed. The radical American Right's insistence on revising history - so that they can whine that they wouldn't have lost all those wars if it wasn't for the pesky Defeatocrats (the Scooby-Doo Villain Excuse) - is highly reminsicent of the spin another set of rightwing warmongers put on Germany's defeat in the Great War, with horrifying consequences.

George Will today:

Come September, America might slip closer toward a Weimar moment. It would be milder than the original but significantly disagreeable.

...When Gen. David Petraeus delivers his report on the war, his Washington audience will include two militant factions. Perhaps nothing he can responsibly say will sway either, so September will reinforce animosities.

One faction -- essentially, congressional Democrats -- is heavily invested in the belief, fervently held by the party's base of donors and activists, that prolonging U.S. involvement can have no benefit commensurate with the costs. The war, this faction says, is lost because even its repeatedly and radically revised objective -- a stable society under a tolerable regime -- is beyond America's military capacity and nation-building competence, and it is politically impossible given the limits of American patience.

The other faction, equal in anger and certitude, argues, not for the first time (remember the transfer of sovereignty to Iraq, Iraqi voters' purple fingers, the Iraqi constitution, the killing of Saddam Hussein's sons, the capture of Hussein, the killing of Zarqawi, etc.), that the tide has turned.

...In [that] faction, there still are those so impervious to experience that they continue to refer to Syria as "lower-hanging fruit." Such metaphors bewitch minds. Low-hanging fruit is plucked, then eaten. What does one nation do when it plucks another? In Iraq, America is in its fifth year of learning the answer.

That same faction are also pushing the idea that an attack on Iran can be a "no-cost" venture or even make a profit.

Thus fell Poland and France.